The longue durée of crime

Sometimes I may reach a bit for a crime-fiction connection in my non-crime reading, but this time the connection is clear: the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe's invocation of the historian Fernand Braudel's three-level scale of time and history, roughly translated, in ascending order of duration, as events, underlying trends, and geography and environment (longue durée), reminded me of a discussion here two years ago about crime crossing national lines in a repetition of ancient patterns.

The authors in question were Sweden's Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, and I noted the multiple border crossings that lay at the heart of their Dagger-winning novel Three Seconds. (The police protagonist's name means border, for one thing.) Here's part of what I wrote at the time:

"I like to think that globalization in their world (and in that of Agnete Friis and Lene Kaaberbøl, where Lithuanian streetwalkers are part of the Danish human landscape) is neither new nor monolithic, but rather a reawakening of old, even ancient economic ties previously obscured by wars and revolution. In this case, the ties are those that bind the Baltic and North Seas and the nations that surround them. Once they traded herring and salt; today's commodities are methamphetamine and hookers.

"The authors rarely make this point explicitly or didactically, and that's part of what makes their books exciting. They really do take readers into a new/old world."

Discuss without, if possible, submitting an academic-style paper on crime as a medium of economic and social exchange.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Juicy bits at Crimefest

Sounds better than "pulp."

"Juicy bits" is what they call citrus pulp here in the UK, and I'm probably not the first North American who has enjoyed a salacious snicker at the breakfast table over the expression.

Crimefest 2012 begins this afternoon, and this young crime fiction festival must have arrived. This years's lineup includes Frederick Forsyth, P.D. James, and Sue Grafton, plus more Scandinavians than you could shake a plate of lutefisk at and a passel of old Detectives Beyond Friends, including Declan Burke, Anne Zouroudi, Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, Chris Ewan, and Michael Stanley.

It was the latter two ("Michael Stanley" is the nom de publication of the writing team of Stanley Trollip and Michael Sears) who suggested a hair dryer and a tiny Phillips screw driver might salvage my camera from a minor aquatic accident suffered on the train yesterday.

Here the Crimefest program, complete with juicy bits. More to come.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Morality and crime fiction, America and abroad

Eddie's World, Charlie Stella's first novel, has as a preface this angry denunciation of the American federal witness protection program:

"The federal witness protection program is a moral assault on our society. Deals with the Devil are evil by their nature. When people can trade up to nineteen lives for the opportunity to relocate from one coast to an Arizona desert (to ultimately establish a drug business), the government, whatever its original intent, has made fools of us all. Perhaps a more novel approach might be to rethink a Society Protection Program ... where someone who admits to killing nineteen people* might rot away in a cell before they burn in hell."

That reminds me of the ringing, righteously didactic voiceovers you'd get in some 1950s crime movies. But it also reminds me of Three Seconds, the Dagger-winning crime thriller by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, which meditates on the ethical hazards of using police informants — cheap ways of outsourcing intelligence-gathering, as one character says.

Another one of Stella's books has a similarly ringing preface, this time denouncing Enron and Arthur Anderson and wishing upon the perpetrators of that scandal a look at real prisons where real people go.  So you don't need to join an Occupy protest or the tea party. Just read Charlie Stella instead.

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* Stella presumably refers to "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, whose testimony helped bring down John Gotti.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Is privatization the new murder?

Well, no, but it has come in for some caustic remarks in a pair of crime novels discussed here recently: Bloodland, by Alan Glynn, and Three Seconds, by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström.

In the former, a private soldier placed on leave after witnessing a massacre remarks that going on leave has a different meaning for private military contractors (PMC). Unlike in the army, he says, being told to take leave for a PMC means get the hell out, and don't come back.

In Three Seconds, a thriller that meditates on the ethical pitfalls of using police informants, a character remarks caustically that informants are cheap ways of outsourcing intelligence-gathering.

What other crime novels cast an eye, skeptical or otherwise, on privatization?

***

Some of you will know that I work as a newspaper copy editor to earn Bouchercon money. Tonight at work I read a column about a gathering of investors and dealmakers pessimistic about business prospects.

The speakers included Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who rattled off a list of foreign-policy hot spots, according to our columnist, before wrapping up with "a bit of manager-speak: `None of these are problems to be solved,' Hayden said. `They are conditions to be managed.'"

"By government-funded security contractors, no doubt," our columnist added. "One of the few growth sectors."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2011 in pictures

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

(At right, Bouchercon stragglers head to Laclede's Landing in St. Louis for dinner Sunday night. Below, Ali Karim [left] with Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

Variation on a Swedish crime theme, plus a Bouchercon hosanna

There may be something to this Scandinavian crime fiction hoopla. I've just read Anders Roslund & Börge Hellström and Agnete Friis & Lene Kaaberbøl in preparation for a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2011 next month, and readers of this blog will know that I've been impressed.

Most recently I noticed that even as they build the tension in Three Seconds, Roslund and Hellström shoot the novel through with social concerns and tell their story from multiple points of view. Each of these is characteristic of Nordic crime writing, though their sympathy for individuals crushed by a system prepared to dispose of them when they are  longer useful makes R&H distant cousins of Jean-Patrick Manchette's as well. So, even though Three Seconds does not read like much of the other Swedish crime fiction that comes immediately to mind, it shares with it certain thematic interests.

***

I'll take time between books to send Bouchercon bouquets to Ruth Jordan and Judy Bobalik, in charge of programming for this year's convention. They should be thanked on principle for their hard work on this and other cons over the years, but they've done two especially nice things this time: They got panel notifications out early, and they scheduled multiple panels on similar themes. This will increase chances that convention goers get to attend at least one session on their topics of special interest.

Thanks, ladies, and may every one of Bouchercon's  1,600 attendees buy you at least one drink.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Test detects a trace of humor in Swedish crime novel

Did I say Danes were the funniest of the Nordic peoples? No, not really; it was a commenter who said it, but I did not disagree.

But those tension-ratcheting Swedes, Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, get in a good one, too, in an otherwise grim passage about prison life in their novel Three Seconds:

"Every day in every prison, every waking hour was about drugs: how to get them in, and how to use them without it being discovered by the regular urine tests. A relative who came to visit was also a relative who could be forced to smuggle in some urine, their own, urine that was clean and would test negative. Once, in his first few weeks in Österåker, some mouthy Serb got his girlfriend to piss into a couple of mugs, the contents of which was then sold for a great deal of money. None of them tested positive, despite the fact that more than half of them were under the influence, but the tests did show something else, and that was that every man in the unit was pregnant."

***

Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström will be part of my panel "A QUESTION OF DEATH: HOW IMPORTANT IS WHODUNIT?" on Thursday, Sept. 15, 10 a.m.-11 a.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The North will rise again: Roslund and Hellström's world

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, those progenitors of modern Nordic crime writing, sent Martin Beck to Hungary in The Man Who Went up in Smoke, but they generally kept him at home in Sweden as they probed the dark underside of that country's welfare state.

Henning Mankell, the next generation's leading light, wrote books "that connect crimes in Sweden to the rest of the world," according to one review, but there is always a sense in the books of national borders to be crossed.  The White Lioness, for example, divides its plot into two segments, one South African, one Swedish.

For the current generation of Nordic crime writers, borders might as well not exist, and not necessarily because of "globalization" either. (How quaint, naive and archaic that word sounds today.) Three Seconds, the Dagger-winning novel by the Swedish authors Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, offers a Swedish-Polish co-protagonist of Russian/German background infiltrating the Polish mafia in a case that involves Danish as well as Swedish police. His opposite number is a police detective whose name, Grens, is the Dutch word for border. (The Swedish-Polish protagonist has twin sons whose names are those of two of the greatest Dutch Renaissance humanists. I have no idea what significance this has, but it contributes to the novel's strong pan-Northern Europe feel.)

We get ferry trips between Poland and Sweden, sudden plane trips to Denmark, and crowded scenes at Warsaw's airport, and the authors make no big deal about this. It's how their world works.

I like to think that globalization in their world (and in that of Agnete Friis and Lene Kaaberbøl, where Lithuanian streetwalkers are part of the Danish human landscape) is neither new nor monolithic, but rather a reawakening of old, even ancient economic ties previously obscured by wars and revolution. In this case, the ties are those that bind the Baltic and North Seas and the nations that surround them. Once they traded herring and salt; today's commodities are methamphetamine and hookers.

The authors rarely make this point explicitly or didactically, and that's part of what makes their books exciting. They really do take readers into a new/old world.

(For an entertaining exposition of the view that Northern Europe constitutes an overlooked cultural and economic sphere, watch Jonathan Meades' documentary Magnetic North.)

***

Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström, Agnete Friis and Lene Kaaberbøl will be part of my panel "A QUESTION OF DEATH: HOW IMPORTANT IS WHODUNIT?" on Thursday, Sept. 15, 10 a.m.-11 a.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011